All roads should lead to all people.
Where does your hot water come from?
Most of us have a water heater of some form in the building. The water heater combines cold water, electricity, and sometimes sunlight or gas to produce the hot water on-site. While utility services provide some of the elements needed to obtain the water and heat it, we could not efficiently get any hot water without using an on-site water heating appliance. Subscribing to a hot water delivery service would be very inefficient and expensive by comparison.
The Internet is currently distributed and dictated from the top down. We can create a new, more democratic, more bottom-up Internet, that will be better for people.
The grant of Internet technology to private industry followed a similar pattern. All roads onto this new civilian network lead through our existing regional communications market operators: the “Baby Bell” telecom incumbents. Even the secondary commercial channel goes through an existing central-broadcast incumbency: the local television cable operators. Both institutions follow the same hub-and-spoke distribution model within their “last mile.” The core hub represents the authority, the incumbents, while the spoke ends represent us, the little people — the “subscribers.” There is currently no such thing as an eCitizen — we can’t even vote on our Internet connections! We’re all just “subscribers” paying for a “service,” no matter how few providers actually exist, no matter how powerless we are against them.
What we need now is a new, bottom-up, “first mile” version of the Internet. This new vision for the Internet can exploit these existing institutions, yet it does not require any of them. I think we can build something even better than Network Neutrality into this new design. Instead, we can build a people-centered network. The only prejudices we should have to deal with on this network are our own.